Tuesday 19 June 2018

Who's in the Doghouse, Greenies?

Here are a couple of entertaining graphics, (courtesy of data from BP: that's millions of tonnes of CO2 along the bottom).

Well, whatdya know?  Those paragons of renewable energy, the EU and China ...

And hey, aren't we still in the EU - what's been our 'contribution' over the years?


At yet still, somehow, the Energiewende is the model we should all revere.   When will someone tell these simpering green idiots:  measure the wrong thing and you'll get the wrong results.  Measuring 'renewables' gets you a lot of bits of expensive kit labelled 'renewable' (and very big electricity bills).  It says very little about the outturn CO2.

ND

16 comments:

DJK said...

Not quite "how to lie with statistics", but your charts tell us nothing. If UK emissions have dropped by 60 million tons in three years, have they dropped from 80 to 20, or from 1060 to 1000? The drop in three years doesn't tell us how the UK now compares, on a per capita basis, with France, Germany, China, etc.

I assume that the drop is mostly due to closing coal fired power stations, but how does the UK compare to France, which had and has mostly nuclear power stations, with very few coal to close?

Nick Drew said...

Well yes, in isolation

but we do have some context, n'est-ce pas?

and in that context the German situation is Utterly Ridiculous

dustybloke said...

Gosh, I really do regret not having a proper edukation.

In my simple way I thought the bottom graph showed that the UK reduced its emissions by a lot and Germany increased its emissions. But apparently, they tell us nothing.

Silly me.

andrew said...

In 2017 the uk did about 367m tonnes of co2

Electro-Kevin said...

But the economic slow down is due to Brexit.

I see.

(Then there are the govt/BofE economic slow down measures to add.)

Electro-Kevin said...

We're the Clean Man of Europe ! It's going to make their stats look really shit when we leave.

Raedwald said...

According to London's Environmental Health Officers, the CO2 reduction achieved is entirely down to their efforts to stop Londoners using log burning stoves. Each little cast-iron monster sitting innocently in an islington chimney breast produces as much CO2 as a 3.5MW coal-burning power station, we're told, and they say the hipsters at no. 42 are personally responsible for over 4,000 premature deaths, surpassing even the paltry 800 killed by an NHS 'angel of death' GP in Portsmouth.

Remember, burning logs kills people.

hovis said...

Slow learner here - I always understood CO2 was also the wrong thing to be measuring, with methane being worse just not so easy to use as a metaphorical stick to beat us with.

Raedwald: dont start me on the slack brain Env Health morons, having to take them to court.

rwendland said...

If you want the percentage changes, with a longer perspective of 10 years, the main ones expressed as annual percentage change over the period :

Country / 2016-2017 / 2006-2016

UK / -2.7% / -3.4%
France / 2.0% / -1.9%
US / -0.5% / -1.2%
Germany / 0.1% / -0.9%
China / 1.6% / 3.2%
India / 4.4% / 6.0%

(Carbon dioxide emissions - again from the BP report)

Looks like the UK is the golden boy, but is it just the banking crisis recession and the reduction of coal use doing that? Couldn't find per-capita data which I think would be more useful.

Anonymous said...

iOpener
'up to a point Lord Copper'
the importance of 'emissions' and the whole carbon scam lies in the agendas concealed behind it.
From The Guardian of 20th June:

'Would you give up having children to save the planet? Meet the couples who have'

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jun/20/give-up-having-children-couples-save-planet-climate-crisis

Anecdotally I hear there have been local/regional press articles recently on the same theme.

hovis said...

Anon 7.25am - Agenda 21 and Kalergi - you'll be scoffed at around these parts. The actions which fit a grand narratives will be dismissed as 'conspiracy theory'. The best recognition you'll get is the 'it seems they're not acting in our interests'.

The very intersting thing around environmentalism is that there is a lot of really really bad stuff going on whicch is it benefitial to not happen, (collapse of soil microbiome for one), but the official green bogeymen, if you pardon the pun, are more often as not closer to straw men. Neither the official pro or anti greens offer much, both are dressed in totalitarian clothes and misdirect imo.

Anonymous said...

" I always understood CO2 was also the wrong thing to be measuring, with methane being worse"

Methane is a more effective greenhouse gas than CO2, but there is much less of it. So at present, CO2 is the main problem. Nuclear power stations are the solution.

Water vapour is the main greenhouse gas in the Earth's atmosphere, because there is so much of it. However, unlike CO2 and Methane, its concentration is limited. Above 100% humidity, it falls out of the air in the form of liquid droplets, which you may have been struck by.

Some people worry that large amounts of Methane might in the future be released from thawing permafrost or from the sea floor, thus accelerating global warming. This isn't going to happen in my lifetime.

Don Cox

Raedwald said...

Some years ago I spoke at a conference with a goodly number of local councillors amongst the attendees. I was talking about a construction industry reduce-reuse-minimise sort of scheme. One northern alderman informed me proudly that ALL arboricultural arisings and cleared trees in his district council were piled in existing woodlands to rot naturally 'for the Stag Beetles'.

I explained as gently as I could that this produced significant quantities of methane as the wood rotted, methane being some 8X worse than CO2 for global warming. Overall, it would have been better, in environmental terms, to burn the wood.

His face set itself into a polite rictus of disbelief. Clearly, stag beetles were easier to sell to voters ..

hovis said...

Don - that begs the question though if CO2 is always present in larger quantities is it a problem because of proprtionality or at all?

As per iOpener's comment are the initial predicates wrong? (I am not expecting an answer just throwing it into the ring.)

I always understood CO2 was a more political fix given the the coming together of campaigners, governments, NGOs and businesses et al eager for money/power, somthing to hang their hats on - after all something must be (seen to be) done, think iof the children.

Nick Drew said...

Hovis, iOpener - first a word of context: this blog (as Hovis notes) is not much given to pursuing conspiracy theories, preferring to stick with things at more-or-less face value. There's quite enough merriment to be had in that vein (and quite a lot of outright nuttery if you go too far along other avenues ... see other blogs ad nauseam)

as regards GW: another topic we don't choose to rehearse at length (other blogs do it *oh-so-much-better*). In keeping with the above, my post was simply taking the received wisdom of the EU and mocking it by is own lights. You can click on the tags to find a decade's worth of C@W mocking the received wisdom of the EU by its own lights - as Hovis (again) says, "there is a lot of really really bad stuff going on", and I love a good reductio ad absurdum, me

if you press me on GW, I'll say as I've said before: GW is a fact; AGW is a theory; CAGW is a pure guess. As regards the 'theory' (and somewhat to Anon@7:25's point) my basic analysis is that if GW really is AGW, this could just as easily be turned into a debate about population; or meat-eating; or water-shortages; but the fixation on CO2 (almost to the exclusion of everything else) derives fundamentally on a couple of wholly doctrinaire strands of leftie-greenie thinking:

(a) thou must never question population growth (though there are some leftie-greenies who do, and increasingly more so)
(b) inherent anti-capitalism, which comes out as anti-industrialism (though again, there are 'workerist' lefties who don't much go with that)

OK?

Anonymous said...

"methane being some 8X worse than CO2 for global warming"

Methane may be 8x as effective, but there is about 200x as much CO2 in the atmosphere as there is Methane. So I propose not to worry about Methane, at least not this century.

See the table here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Earth#Absorption

By far the greatest cause of global warming is water vapor. CO2 makes only a small difference, but we may find that an increase in global temperature of, say, 10 degrees is quite inconvenient. So far, the effect of increasing CO2 is almost one degree.

It's possible that we might be due for a "little ice age" -- in which case, the CO2 would ameliorate it.

In spite of all the fuss about wind turbines, and the people who have made a killing on subsidies, there hasn't been any significant decrease in the rate at which we are adding CO2 to the atmosphere.

Don Cox